A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state’s policy-in-waiting.

The idea of a government paying its citizens to keep them out of poverty—now known as basic income—is hardly new. Often dated as far back as ancient Rome, basic income’s modern conception truly emerged in the late nineteenth century. Yet as one of today’s most controversial proposals, it draws supporters from across the political spectrum.

In this eye-opening work, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas trace basic income from its rise in American and British policy debates following periods of economic tumult to its modern relationship with technopopulist figures in Silicon Valley. They chronicle how the idea first arose in the United States and Europe as a market-friendly alternative to the postwar welfare state and how interest in the policy has grown in the wake of the 2008 credit crisis and COVID-19 crash.

An incisive, comprehensive history, Welfare for Markets tells the story of how a fringe idea conceived in economics seminars went global, revealing the most significant shift in political culture since the end of the Cold War.

"The strengths of Jäger and Zamora’s historical approach are indisputable. They amply demonstrate what others have only hinted at—the depths of the political-economic and cultural shifts that led to the ascendence of market fundamentalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Their history is both broad and deep. Certainly it will become the authoritative account of the origins of UBI." - Jacobin

"Though meticulously researched, Welfare for Markets is a slim volume of succinct and lucid argumentation." - Boston Review

"Welfare for Markets [dismantles] the mythological history of UBI, which presents it as a timeless ideal of social justice backed by enlightened thinkers through the ages: Thomas More, Thomas Paine, Orestes Brownson, Charles Fourier and GDH Cole, among others. According to Jäger and Zamora Vargas, the supposed progenitors of basic income were anything but." - New Statesman

"[There] are vital insights that can be gleaned from Welfare for Markets, which deftly surveys many of the philosophical and political quandaries that basic income poses." - American Affairs

"Welfare for Markets [describes] how shocks to twentieth-century capitalism turned basic income into an ideal tool for deconstructing and rethinking social policy." - Journal of Economic Literature

""Welfare for Markets is a well-chosen title for an illuminating analysis of the intellectual history of basic income."" - Counterfire

"[Jäger and Zamora Vargas] have teamed up again with this carefully researched historical reference that examines public welfare proposals from diverse ideological perspectives. They show that capitalist free markets do not benefit all individuals...This eye-opening work should be considered as a first purchase." - Library Journal

"Welfare for Markets is a stimulating and comprehensive book that fulfils the promise of offering 'a global history of basic income'...Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas explore, in time and space, the different proposals for guaranteed income in order to unfold the worldviews that underpin them." - Œconomia